Noob question for a near space project

[cowboybob]

The still image looks like its over the Cherburg region.?

Good call, eric.

Didja google earth it?... like I did...?

Course, being from England and all, guess you're pretty familiar with the area.

I told my wife it looked like the Atlantic, just from the other side .

CBB

EDIT: What a sec. Now I'm not so sure of what I'm looking at (geography was never my strongest suit).

EDIT2: The still photo of the area just to the right of center bottom in the OP's last post looks like it's the area around Saint-Tropez? Is that right?

EDIT3: SOOO...guess that ain't the Atlantic, is it?

 

[JimB]

A great project, well done.

Guys - Reading the comments with the youtube video, it landed in the sea very near the coast in the gulf of St Tropez.

EricGibbs wrote:

I was initially concerned about the range of curvature of the Earth shown on your images for 20 miles altitude.
I would not have expected a curvature like that, so I looked back thru your images and I see that the camera lens was introducing the extended curvature.

The Earths curvature is quite noticable in a high flying aircraft (Boeing 747 at 40,000ft), I was quite surprised myself when I first noticed it.
Admitedly the camera does seem to add to the effect, but some of what was seen there was the real curvature, no problem.

It would have been nice to have had a height recording to know how far up it really went.

JimB

 

[audioguru]

It is too bad that the balloon burst. If it had a pressure relief valve then the balloon would have gone higher then might have sailed around the earth a few times.

 

[rthuey]

It is too bad that the balloon burst. If it had a pressure relief valve then the balloon would have gone higher then might have sailed around the earth a few times.

are you implying that it was not an intentional burst? i was thinking that he had rigged it to detach/deflate/burst at the 100k he mentioned in first post.

excellent job to the OP

 

[audioguru]

are you implying that it was not an intentional burst?

All balloons burst when they fly high and do not have extra space for expansion or a pressure relief valve.

Here are photos of two weather balloons. One has extra space and can fly extremely high before bursting. The other is already tightly inflated on the ground and will burst soon.

 

[ericgibbs]

A great project, well done.

The Earths curvature is quite noticable in a high flying aircraft (Boeing 747 at 40,000ft), I was quite surprised myself when I first noticed it.
Admitedly the camera does seem to add to the effect, but some of what was seen there was the real curvature, no problem.

It would have been nice to have had a height recording to know how far up it really went.

JimB

hi Jim.
Also having spent many days at 11,000 mtrs strapped in a 747 seat [economy] I agree that the Earth's curvature can be seen.

This link shows the curvature I would expect to see at around 30,000 mtrs, the OP's images suggest an apparent altitude of around 100 miles.

https://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/high-school-kids-launch

Just to be clear, as I have already said, I think its a great achievement and well done.

Eric

 

[sichroteph]

Thanks all for your support messages. I am quite happy all goes well and will try to enlight most of the questions here.
The ballon was launched from south of France. It landed in Saint-Tropez, at 100m from the land, into the sea, in front of a tourist that just rented a boat. We were obviously both pretty lucky and bad in our landing estimations/margins.

The ballon has a inital diameter of 2 meters. With taking altitude, the pressure goes down and the bollon expand itself to 8 meters until it burst. (at approximatively 100.000 foot - 30kms)
I was mostly concerned about the cold up there (-56.5 celcius degrees) that would shut down all my electronical devices without a good isolation.
So there were an additional layer of styrofoam between the cameras and the "heart" of the box, the Gps device with in each sides some little hand heaters.
I suspected the plexiglass glasses to let enter too much cold and was unfortunately right beacause even the Gopro camera shut itself down just after the burst of the ballon. No landing video this time !

A Htc desire was bought on ebay to track the ballon : An app (Watchdroid) was installed in order to sms its Gps coordinates and keywords like : "mistralrider:gps" (Anti-theft software)

The curvature of the earth is exaggerated because of the gopro camera, wich is wide angle (170degrees) If there is a next time I will perhaps think about another camera.
What I love the most is the darkness of the sky after a while. We can guess too the corsica island, at 110 miles from there.

Glad you liked it, I am very happy it all goes well. I tried to mentaly prepare myself loosing everything so when opening the box I was like a little child opening his gift.
If some of you want to try the same adventure, I can of course provide links-documents and advices from my little experience.